Michael Hiltzik

The Economy Hub

Republican control of both houses of Congress gives the GOP extraordinary power over science policy in the United States. Last month, we had a lengthy discussion of the party's interests and outlook in scientific research with Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas), who had been named chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on commerce, justice and science.

As you may have heard, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who astonishingly enough is chairman of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, brought a snowball to the floor of the U.S. Senate last week to debunk "all this hysteria about global warming."

Shareholders of the big high-tech company Hewlett-Packard have done pretty nicely over the last year. Their stock gains have outpaced the Standard & Poor's 500 Index by about 14 percentage points, and in 2014 they pocketed a handsome $2.7 billion through share repurchases and $1.2 billion in dividends.

The Chinese company Lenovo has become known as the world's largest PC maker. Now it's also becoming famous as the computer company that may have committed the worst breach on record of its own customers' privacy and security.

Three words of advice for all you iPhone fans who are enthralled by the idea that Apple is entering the car market and are preparing to be first in line at the Apple Store when those fabulous cars start rolling off the production line:

For all intents and purposes, marijuana legalization is here to stay. That has raised the hackles of auto safety advocates and legislators, who reason that anything that puts impaired drivers behind the wheel can't be good.

In the years since its Deepwater Horizon oil spill befouled huge stretches of the Gulf of Mexico, oil giant BP has honed its skill at cherry-picking scientific studies to duck responsibility for the spill's environmental impacts.

The citizens of Claremont showed what they thought of their local water company's rates last November, when they voted overwhelmingly to let the city seize the private company and begin the process of converting it into a municipal utility.

My colleagues Bill Plaschke, Bill Shaikin and Meg James are reporting that for the second year in a row, Los Angeles Dodger games may be blacked out for TV viewers in Southern California, except for subscribers to Time Warner Cable.

Many disabled American workers and disability advocates may have hoped that the Senate's Republican majority would try to understand the crisis facing Social Security's disability program. Those hopes were slaughtered Wednesday.

Any way you cut it, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim are among the richest teams in professional sports. Last year Forbes ranked them 10th in franchise value among Major League Baseball teams, at $775 million, with revenue of about $253 million.

Former Goldman Sachs Co-Chairman John C. Whitehead has been getting a very adulatory sendoff in the obituary columns since his death on Saturday at the age of 92. The obits mention his "moral compass," his leadership of numerous philanthropies, his role in helping lower Manhattan recover from the 9/11 attack, his valorous service during World War II.

In principle, almost everyone's in favor of free trade. It promotes international harmony, raises wages, helps economies grow. It's an article of historical faith that the enactment of harsh protective U.S. tariffs in 1930 contributed to the Great Depression. And who wants that?

Baton Rouge, La., is about to lose one of its crucial hospital emergency rooms, and the reason is clear: The administration of Gov. Bobby Jindal has refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and won't put up any other money to keep the facility open.

Reader E.G. Rice of Marina del Rey has taken issue with my recent post on the nice raise that IBM has given its chairman and CEO, Virginia Rometty, despite the company's awful financial results in 2014. To recap, Rometty is getting a $3.6-million bonus for 2014 and a $13.3-million stock incentive award payable in 2018. She's also getting a 6.7% bump in her base salary, to $1.6 million from $1.5 million.

As we've been pointing out almost since the inception of the 2015 measles epidemic, outbreaks of such vaccine-preventable diseases are often associated with overly indulgent exemptions from mandatory childhood immunizations.

Participating in the extended game of "Telephone" that is the Internet, the news site Vox has unearthed a report of a public appearance by then-Sen. Barack Obama to suggest that he "pandered" to anti-vaccination groups by acknowledging a vaccine-autism link in 2008, when he was launching his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Few American companies are as skilled at reaching out and touching their customer base as Walt Disney Co., which will be ramping up its publicity machine to a very high engine speed over the next few months. The marketing surge for Disneyland's 60th anniversary is already underway; recent news stories about the "amazing" new parade and fireworks show that will launch the celebration at the Anaheim park on May 22 are only the beginning.

The IBM board of directors did a huge favor for mediocre CEOs the world over on Friday by announcing (quietly) that it has granted Chairman and Chief Executive Virginia Rometty a $3.6-million bonus for 2014 and a $13.3-million stock incentive award payable in 2018. She's also getting a 6.7% bump in her base salary, to $1.6 million from $1.5 million.

If there's a silver lining in the ongoing outbreak of measles linked to infected and unvaccinated visitors to Disneyland during the holidays, it's that the crisis may spur state lawmakers to reverse the trend expanding exemptions from mandatory childhood immunizations.

The continuing and spreading outbreak of measles traced originally to visitors to Disneyland and Disney's California Adventure park revives the questions of who should be held responsible, and how they should be made to pay for the injury and illness they've caused.

Several aspects of public opinion on the Affordable Care Act have remained unchanging virtually since its inception: most people don't know what it does or how it affects them personally, but when asked about it in the most general terms they say they're against it.

To provide context to the ongoing outbreak of measles linked to visits to Disneyland and the influence of the anti-vaccination movement, science writer Seth Mnookin revisits the saga of one of the most celebrated anti-vaxxers, starlet Jenny McCarthy.

Rarely do conservative opponents of the Affordable Care Act acknowledge the real human consequences of their campaign to overturn the healthcare reform law. But an astonishing op-ed published Friday by the Washington Post does just that.

If you're wondering why issues favored by a majority of Americans such as raising the minimum wage, gun control and net neutrality get scarcely any attention in the halls of Congress, the Citizens United case is the reason.

It has almost become a cliche that the politicians who bray the loudest about cutting government waste and slashing "entitlements" turn out to have learned what they know about the government trough from the inside.

Intuit, which is reeling from customer outrage over a surreptitious price hike this year in its market-leading TurboTax tax preparation software, has moved to quell the anger. But it may not have done enough.

The rise of the anti-vaccination movement has shown that even affluent and well-educated parents can be dolts, and that school and public health officials can be inexcusably complacent. The Disneyland measles outbreak may finally give all these parties a much-needed jolt of reality.

The secular world is having a good guffaw over the embarrassment of Tyndale House, a Christian book publisher that announced last week it was withdrawing from print its bestseller "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven."

President Obama packed so many proposals into his State of the Union address Tuesday night that it was hard to grab hold of each one before he careened on to the next. And that's not counting the occasional zingers, including his reference to his two presidential election victories in response to a brief outburst of grade-school hooliganism from the Republicans in the House chamber.

Corporations have it. So do infants before they can walk, children, even oceangoing vessels. It's the right to bring a lawsuit in their own name. More attention is being given to the question of whether wild animals, valleys, rivers, meadows or mountain ranges--in short, nature herself--should have standing to appear as plaintiffs in court.

In these parlous times when conservatives are sharpening their knives to slash Social Security benefits, the last thing nearly 60 million beneficiaries need is someone working to erode the program from the inside.

With President Obama placing tax reform on the table in his State of the Union address, scheduled for delivery to Congress on Tuesday, we can expect weeks or months of Washington debate about the vices and virtues of the tax breaks held dear by many segments of the taxpaying public.

Travel obligations kept me from addressing until now the attack on Social Security disability recipients made last week by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), but it was too outstandingly ignorant and cynical to go unanswered.

President Obama's proposal unveiled Thursday to provide free community college education to all "responsible" students is garnering immense attention. That's as it should be, although the details still need to be fleshed out and individual states will have to agree to shoulder a share of the costs.

Lawsuits aimed at eviscerating the Affordable Care Act have been lining up in federal courts like airliners on America's taxiways. Most are frivolous or partisan or both, and some have already been tossed. The Supreme Court on Friday will ponder whether to hear one that actually has some merit.

All the Internet has been abuzz since Wednesday, when Federal Communications Chairman Tom Wheeler spoke as though he's leaning toward much stricter oversight of net neutrality rules in a way that benefits consumers.

As many as 12 measles cases have been connected to visits to Disneyland or Disney's California Adventure Park, California public health authorities say--including at least six occurring in people who were unvaccinated for the disease. Among them were two infants too young for immunizations.

When it comes to the Affordable Care Act, you have two choices about what to believe. You can go with objective statistics from Gallup, a respected survey organization, which indicate that the law has increased the number of Americans with health insurance by more than 10 million.

Announcements of possible NFL team relocations often cause the same frissons of expectation and trepidation in their target communities as videotaped threats from unknown terrorist groups. In both cases, projections of what might happen do battle with the sheer unlikelihood of anything happening. Hope, or fear, almost always wins out over rational judgment, at least at first.

It took more than a year to get the ball rolling, but California just struck one of the most important blows against brainless public policymaking in years: The state on Friday started issuing driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants.

The iPad and other tablets are popular because they're good at a wide range of functions -- Web browsing, game-playing, emailing, listening to music and reading. For smartphones, add phone-calling and text messaging.

Because we shouldn't let the terrorists win, and also one always needs a reason to be out of the house while Christmas dinner is being prepared, we headed out to our local small-chain theater Thursday to see Sony’s “The Interview.”

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) wasted enormous congressional resources over the last 18 months trying to inflate the IRS "scandal" into a mountain. The release Tuesday of his final, petulant report on the affair marks what may be its final decline into a mouse.

Doug Elmendorf has been viewed as a marked man in Washington ever since the last election, when Republicans won a majority in both houses of Congress for 2015. Now confirmation comes via Bloomberg that he won't be reappointed to his job as director of the Congressional Budget Office in January.

Some of the consequences of climate change are obvious -- shrinking polar ice caps, rising sea levels, more damaging floods -- and some are subtle. Among the latter, we can now add bad-tasting seafood.

One aspect of the Texas economic "miracle" that made the triumphalism of its promoters so hard to stomach was the way they glossed over one of its key drivers: the oil boom. Now that global oil prices are plummeting -- down 50% since the summer -- Texas may be facing a less than miraculous future.

President Obama has done his best to tamp down fury at North Korea for hacking Sony--"I don't think it was an act of war," he said Sunday on CNN, but "cybervandalism"--but to find true skepticism about North Korea's role in the attack, you have to turn to the professional hacking and anti-hacking community.

The National Children's Study was launched with a fanfare of expectation and ambition in 2000. The idea was to follow 100,000 American children from the pre-natal stage to age 21, collecting an unprecedented volume of data on "environmental influences (including physical, chemical, biological, and psychosocial) on children’s health and development," in the words of the enabling federal legislation, the Children's Health Act. As Science Magazine reported, it was the largest and most complex longitudinal study of its kind ever planned in the United States.

The received wisdom that North Korea is responsible for hacking Sony Pictures Entertainment has taken over discussion so thoroughly that the Obama administration already has been chided for not taking firm action against the insular regime. Until Friday, official sources' attribution of blame to North Korea was off the record; the FBI has now issued a formal accusation.

There may be some elderly Cubans in Havana who long ago gave up hope that the U.S. embargo against their country would ever end. On these shores, however, the 50-year policy of isolating Cuba has seemed so useless for so long that many people assumed it would just wither away, sooner or later.

In these waning days of the Democratic Senate, the majority is taking advantage of a muffed procedural maneuver by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to confirm a passel of otherwise stalled executive branch appointees.

The hacking of Sony Pictures' internal systems and the dumping of personal and corporate information onto the Internet--the biggest entertainment story of the year--confronts news organizations and the public with two complex puzzles. One is how to report the divulged information, and the other is what to make of it.

Underscoring how much mischief can result when Congress acts in haste and in secret, hidden away in the year-end omnibus spending bill being acted on this week is an attack on a key provision of the Affordable Care Act long targeted by the GOP.

As job growth picks up and the unemployment rate declines, naysayers about the strength of the U.S. economy have aimed their fire ever more intensely at what is supposedly the one black hole in national statistics: the labor force participation rate.

I was the first Los Angeles Times reporter to interview Sam Zell after he bought the newspaper's parent company, Tribune, in 2007. During our interview at the executive jet terminal at LAX, he was blunt, crude and profane. He started the meeting with an extended rant about Times columnist Steve Lopez, who wasn't present but had had the effrontery to drive up to Zell's Malibu hideaway when he wasn't there and do journalism by interviewing the housekeeper. But he also pledged to make the company bigger and stronger.

The movement to force university endowments to divest their holdings in fossil fuel companies -- coal, oil and gas -- has some obvious shortcomings: For one thing, the effort is relatively painless, since it's unlikely that the endowment returns will be materially affected by taking these volatile companies out of their portfolios (or that the companies will care); for another, it's hypocritical, since university communities remain heavy consumers of the very same energy sources.

For almost a year, we've been chronicling BP's efforts to undercut a damage settlement deal its own lawyers helped craft for victims of its record-setting 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Considering how devoted everyone involved in the meltdown of The New Republic is to the principles of trenchant journalism and lucid policy analysis, the most remarkable thing about the event is how obtuse they all are about the magazine's past, present and future.

— In mid-November, the giant Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei invited networking executives from some of the more than 170 countries where it does business for a two-day Global Mobile Broadband Forum. The potential buyers wandered among display tables bathed in a ghostly blue light as corporate associates talked up the products. They represented about 400 companies. None was American.

Passing legislation on a tight deadline--especially a bogus deadline--is invariably a formula for serious mischief. That's what's happening with a proposal to deal with a supposed crisis in worker pensions by allowing trustees to slash the pensions of already-retired workers to shreds.

Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, materializing as a voice of sanity from the Republican Party of yore, says the GOP should act to save the Affordable Care Act if a crucial provision is upset by the Supreme Court.

Some experts have counseled a zen-like patience while awaiting the Supreme Court's consideration of the King case, which involves federal subsidies for Affordable Care Act insurance plans and is expected to yield a decision sometime in July. We've observed that the prospect of subsidies being overturned in as many as three dozen states could or should spur action in those states, or in Congress, to head off the consequences.

Was heathcare reform a fatal political blunder by the Democratic Party? That thesis of Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, received a respectful airing this week from the veteran political journalist and New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall.

When I flew on Aeroflot back in the mid-1990s, everyone flew what we would think of today as Economy; they were still serious about a classless society in those post-Gorbachev years, or perhaps they hadn't quite gotten their arms around the idea of tapping the 0.1% for excess disposable income.

Several generations of home electronics hobbyists, ham radio enthusiasts and computer nerds spent their growth-spurt years haunting their local RadioShack stores. They can't be happy about the company's long slide toward irrelevance and its looming disappearance as a feature of the retail landscape.

The biggest political error committed by Democrats over the last four years has been to run away from their signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act. As a result, they've allowed Republicans and conservatives to depict a measure that improves the lives and health of millions of Americans as harmful, even un-American.

The only complaint about our commercial habits that has become more frequent than the one about Christmas decorations appearing in stores before Thanksgiving is the one about stores now opening on Thanksgiving.

One little-recognized reality of poverty in America is how closely it lurks beneath the surface of even a successful professional life. A bad career turn, a couple of financial missteps, and -- here comes the dizzying plunge from middle class to underclass.

For many thinking Americans, the anti-intellectual core of Republican Party policies was made real during a 2007 primary debate among its 11 presidential candidates, when three raised their hands to say they doubted the theory of evolution.

I’m probably not alone among journalists writing about the Affordable Care Act in finding that the lowest-information emails landing in my inbox lately come from people who have learned one thing about the act, and one thing alone: that some guy named Jonathan Gruber, its ostensible “architect,” said some insulting things about American voters’ stupidity and how they had to be gulled into supporting the bill.

Travel is broadening, so I'll be spending the next week or so expanding my horizons on a reporting trip. Posting on the Economy Hub will be sporadic at best through next Sunday. Feel free to catch up in the meantime by visiting the archives.

In these cynical times when working for the government is often caricatured as almost an act of moral turpitude, lifelong public servants seldom get the respect and admiration they deserve. The passing last weekend of George H. Painter, who served 35 years as an administrative law judge for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and died Saturday in Los Angeles, gives us an opportunity to rectify the injustice.

Via Nina Martin of ProPublica comes word that America's Catholic bishops are moving toward tightening religious restrictions on physicians and nonsectarian hospitals that join with them in mergers and partnerships.

The giant cable and Internet company Comcast has been trying to paint itself as a staunch defender of network neutrality. This effort has been wholly misleading, and never so much as in the company's response Tuesday to President Obama's outspoken defense of the principle, when it issued a statement headlined:

The Federal Communications Commission has received about 4-million comments on its undertaking to remake the rules on network neutrality on the Internet. But it's fair to say that one comment, filed Monday, outweighs all the rest.

The received wisdom about the fate of the Affordable Care Act is that it's in the Supreme Court's hands -- more specifically, in Chief Justice John Roberts' hands, since he's thought to be the swing vote in a 5-4 split on the law. This is key because of the Halbig issue, on which the high court will rule early next year: Does a wording glitch in the ACA mean that federal subsidies can't be offered to residents of the 36 states that didn't create their own insurance exchanges? A Supreme Court ruling in the affirmative would kill federal subsidies for residents of those states, snatching affordable health coverage out of their hands.

No piker when it comes to cliffhanging drama, the Supreme Court late Friday placed the governors and legislatures of 36 states in a corner, by taking up a challenge to the Affordable Care Act that directly threatens their citizens.

The drugstore chain CVS has been making a big deal of its intention to become not merely a corner drugstore, but a healthcare provider. It changed its corporate name from CVS Caremark to CVS Health, and took tobacco products off its shelves to reinforce the good-health story.

The GOP manifesto published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday over the names of Republican leaders John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., included a tweak to the Affordable Care Act they say would provide Americans with "more hours and better pay."

Will Saletan at Slate puts his finger on a fascinating development in the 2014 election: A slew of Republican Senate and House candidates ran on Democratic themes. These included poverty relief, black unemployment, equal pay for women, dismal middle-class economics, income inequality and the protection of Social Security and Medicare.

A federal judge in Minneapolis on Monday refused to block Honeywell International from imposing penalties on workers who refuse to participate in a workplace "wellness" program, denying a request for an injunction by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

In December 2012, Hedge fund investor Bill Ackman painted a huge bull's-eye on the back of Herbalife, labeling the Los Angeles nutritional supplements company an illegal pyramid scheme and placing a $1-billion short bet against its shares.

The scariest term that economists have been throwing around lately is "secular stagnation." That sounds technical, but it's easy enough to explain: it means the economy is in a slump that it may never be able to escape.

Voters are usually inclined to vote their pocketbooks. But that's become more difficult with every election, as the pocketbooks that carry the most weight aren't those of the individual voter, but corporations and plutocrats.

In the Ebola crisis, one seizes on hope where one finds it. At the moment, its unlikely location is Liberia, where World Health Organization officials are cautiously -- very cautiously, hinting that the wave of cases there may be ebbing.

The thorny and unresolved question of whether life itself can be patented may come again before the U.S. Supreme Court, if it accepts a motion filed Friday by Santa Monica-based Consumer Watchdog. (H/T to David Jensen's California Stem Cell Report.)

With only a few days left before election day, pretexts for panic over the sanctity of the ballot box are dwindling down to a precious few. Two political scientists from Virginia's Old Dominion University have done their part, with an article on the Washington Post's Monkey Cage politics website asserting that control of the Senate could be "decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens" on Tuesday.

A caucus of seven nervous Democratic senators, led by Mark Begich of Alaska, has been pushing a plan to "reform" the Affordable Care Act by allowing insurers to offer an even skimpier insurance plan than the skimpiest permitted now.

The Kaiser Family Foundation's latest issue brief on Medicaid offers new evidence on the fiscal implications for states that have opted out of the Medicaid expansion available under the Affordable Care Act. Opting out, the foundation says, is very costly.

During a panic as severe as the current Ebola event, it's wise to watch the news media for pointers on the right way and the wrong way to inform the public. What may be a good example of the latter was posted Sunday by The Atlantic, which should know better.

Emmanuel Saez, that assiduous tracker of economic inequality in the U.S., has been shifting his attention away from income inequality to a broader, thornier and more intractable issue: wealth inequality. As he observes in a paper published this week at the blog of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, wealth inequality is "exploding," constituting "a direct threat to the cherished American ideals of meritocracy and opportunity."

Marking Friday as World Polio Day, the Council on Foreign Relations has released an updated map showing the global prevalence of vaccine-preventable diseases. The map was first released in 2011. We commend Laurie Garrett of the CFR for her work pulling together the data, which covers 2008 through this year.

Evidently feeling some heat over a corporate press release that somehow found its way into Politico Magazine masquerading as an "opinion" op-ed, BP took the unusual step Wednesday of issuing a corporate press release about it. If you're counting, that's two press releases for the price of one.

The unknown factor that keeps advocates of network neutrality up at night is whether our political leaders will have the spine to resist the principle's enemies -- the Comcasts and Verizons of the world, who wish to profiteer from charging website providers extra for preferential access to your home and business.

For Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Rick Perry of Texas, two Republican governors thinking about running for president, the Ebola virus has been a heaven-sent opportunity. It has allowed them to swank around as protectors of public health, distracting their audiences from policies they've implemented that really are threats to public health.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, eminent oncologist, medical sage, policy advisor to the Obama White House, outspoken defender of the Affordable Care Act — has roiled the political and policy communities, both left and right, with an essay in the Atlantic declaring that he hopes to die at age 75. That's a mere 18 years from now.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is facing a stiff reelection challenge this year, has stuck to his stated determination to repeal the Affordable Care Act if his party takes control of the Senate in the next election.

Starting last fall, passengers on Southwest Airlines' usually reliable flights began noticing a sharp deterioration in on-time performance. More flights arrived late, and more flights sat on the ground past their departure times, waiting for connecting passengers from flights that arrived late, and so on and so on.

A few weeks ago, we described how the giant oil company Chevron was barraging little Richmond, Calif. (pop. 107,000), the site of one of its major refineries, with corporate PR disguised as community "news." Its instrument was an objective-looking website, known as the Richmond Standard, purporting to be a news portal for residents of Richmond.

In a rational world, the debate over voter ID laws would be ended by the eloquent, incisive and angry opinion issued late last week by U.S. Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner of Chicago in a case concerning Wisconsin.

Donning the mantle of the nation's scaremonger-in-chief, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., appeared Sunday morning on CNN to weigh in on the latest Ebola news. The nugget he and host Candy Crowley were chewing over was that a healthcare worker who had been helping to care for Thomas Duncan, the Ebola patient who died Wednesday in Dallas, has contracted the disease despite wearing protective gear.

One doesn't have to be a fan of Philip K. Dick to recognize that robots are already participating in our daily routines to the extent that their activities have legal implications. That will become more important as they act with more autonomy, and the law will have to change to deal with it.

The ingenuity of big corporations knows no bounds, especially when it comes to disguising self-interested PR as objective information. Say hello to the latest such effort, a website devoted to communicating information about "sustainable" -- that is, environmentally friendly -- activities called Collectively.org.

Restrictive voter ID laws in Texas and Wisconsin have been blocked by federal judges--in the latter case by the Supreme Court--in what may be harbingers of a judicial pushback against efforts by Republicans to disenfranchise minority voters. Meanwhile the Government Accountability Office released a report documenting that voter ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee succeeded in reducing black voter turnout, as they were devised--let's not beat about the bush--to do.

The vast bulk of trading of New York Stock Exchange-listed shares moved away from the NYSE floor years ago, but the death knell for human-interactive trading may have been sounded recently when MarketWatch, a Dow Jones-owned news website, said it would no longer use photos from the floor to illustrate its market stories.

You don't have to look much further for a taste of what a federal judge recently called "the shenanigans of the rich" than the financial maneuverings of the one-time Silicon Valley millionaire Trip Hawkins.

The idea underlying the open access movement in academia is a simple one: most scientific research is funded by the public through federal or state grants. So why should reports of that research be handed over to commercial publishers, which then charge huge subscription fees to universities and libraries to read work the taxpayers have already paid for?

In the early Tom Hanks comedy "Nothing in Common" (1986), Hanks' youthful advertising executive rips into his creative team for an ad featuring a grandmother flying across country to see her grandchildren. Before leaving home, she's seen sitting at home with her cat.

The investment house Franklin Templeton's effort to knock down the city of Stockton's proposal to emerge from bankruptcy portrays the case as one in which Franklin is defending itself against three big, faceless adversaries.

Northwest Biotherapeutics, a Bethesda, Md., firm with a purported cancer vaccine in development, has been in a long, bitter battle with short-sellers of its shares. It also has implied that Adam Feuerstein, a reporter for TheStreet.com, may be in cahoots with the shorts.

Ever since the bombshell announcement of Bond King Bill Gross' decampment from Pimco to the much smaller Janus Capital, Wall Street pundits and players have been offering their takes on what happened. (Ours is here.)

William Faulkner, who was born in Mississippi 117 years ago today, was America's poet and prophet of race. It's unconventional to observe a man's 117th birthday, but in the wake of a long summer that brought the nation's unresolved racial divide back to the surface in spectacular fashion, there may be no better time to re-examine how Faulkner understood this unique national burden.

On Tuesday I got a message from the good people at the fraud alert center at JPMorgan Chase: They'll be sending me a new Chase credit card because "a security breach at The Home Depot" may have put my old one at risk.

If you happened to click Monday on the Richmond Standard, a community news site for that Bay Area locality, you would have come upon a fairly snarky piece about 170 activists ("some from Richmond") who took a train cross-country to participate in the People's Climate March in New York on Sunday.

"The present primacy of public relations in the management of universities, the view that they must ingratiate themselves with the public, and in particular with the most wealthy and influential portions of it, the doctrine that a university may properly frame its policies in order to get money and that it may properly teach or study whatever it can get financed--these notions are ruinous to a university in any rational conception of it."

Yes, the best defense is a good offense, but sometimes a bad defense is just a bad defense. Sometimes it even makes things worse. For an example, let's look at the defense mounted for NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell by noted Washington lobbyist Lanny Davis.

Federal Judge Carl Barbier of New Orleans already has ruled that BP is guilty of "gross negligence" and "willful misconduct" in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. His Sept. 4 finding exposed the British oil firm to as much as $18 billion in penalties.

The purchase and sale of news reporters by powerful institutions and influential people are hardly a new phenomenon. But like all manifestations of disproportionate wealth, it's been raised to glorious new heights during the early 21st century.

That big thunderclap you might have heard Monday afternoon rumbling from California to the New York island (apologies to Woody Guthrie) was the sound of CalPERS, the nation's largest public pension fund, dumping its entire portfolio of hedge fund investments.

Responding to an academia-wide furor about the firing of a faculty member over a series of provocative tweets on Israel and Gaza, the University of Illinois board of trustees last week took a vote on the case.

Time Warner Cable, which paid more than top dollar to secure Dodgers telecasts well into the future and then managed to prevent millions of Dodger fans from seeing the games on TV during this (possibly) pennant-winning season, is backing down.

Many years ago, I was a cub reporter covering the New York statehouse during a period of amazing corruption. In Albany, the late great investigative reporter Jack Newfield quipped that the arrest rate in the state legislature was higher than it was in the South Bronx. On a metaphorical level, he was right enough.

It's natural for a self-described "fact-checker" to circle the wagons when his fact-checking is called into question. So the defensive reaction of Dana Tims, the author of a "fact-check" about Social Security that we questioned earlier this week, is understandable.

The best sign that conservatives have finally given up their campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act is that they've been cooking up proposals to keep some of the ACA's most important provisions in place, without fully abandoning Republican nostrums like tort reform.

When someone in power praises the principle of free speech, it's wise to be on the lookout for weasel words. The phrase "I favor constructive criticism," is weaseling. So is, "You can express your views as long as they're respectful." In those examples, "constructive" and "respectful" are modifiers concealing that the speaker really doesn't favor free speech at all.

From the American Enterprise Institute, where private industry goes to have its head stroked and be told it's a good boy, comes the latest installment of a series one could call, "Public sector bad, private enterprise good."

Those of us reveling in how the Angels have outdistanced the rest of Major League Baseball this season may not have noticed, but the sport has been suffering from a more than decade-long slump in offense. There are signs that the falloff in slugging generally and home runs especially is taking a bite out of the game's TV ratings, which have fallen by roughly 25% or more over the last decade.

Tolstoy's line about all unhappy families being unhappy in their own way hardly needs validation from us in the 21st century. But still it would be interesting to see what he'd make of the increasingly bitter division between two state agencies that should be working hand in hand to improve health insurance coverage for Californians: the state's individual health insurance exchange, Covered California; and the Department of Insurance.

Another stake in the heart of a popular anti-Obamacare claim has arrived from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which compiled the projected premium changes for 2015 in 15 states and the District of Columbia.

The award for fastest climbdown of the year (so far) goes to The Economist. The magazine already has withdrawn and apologized for a review in its latest issue that criticized a forthcoming book by Cornell historian Edward Baptist for being just too negative about the institution of slavery in the South.

The disconnect between what Americans think of most provisions of Obamacare (love them!) and what they think of "Obamacare" (hate it!) has been the most perplexing aspect of rollout of the Affordable Care Act.

Those ill-placed kicks at a defenseless, cowering puppy have cost Centerplate CEO Desmond Hague his job. The company announced Tuesday that he has resigned and replaced on an acting basis by Chief Operating Officer Chris Verros.

LosAngeles Mayor Eric Garcetti marked Labor Day on Monday by proposing a minimum wage increase for workers in LA, to $13.25 an hour by 2017. The city would join a host of municipalities nationwide that have taken matters into their own hands in the face of resolute inaction by Congress.

This week brought another nugget of good economic news for the U.S. economy. Gross domestic product expanded at a healthy annual rate of 4.2% in the second quarter — a slight upward revision from the earlier reading by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The joke around Southern California long has been that LosAngeles doesn't need an NFL team because it already has a pro franchise -- USC football. The Josh Shaw case is another indication that the joke's on USC.

Say this for Politico and the daily Playbook emails it blasts out to a large circle of Washington opinion makers and their ilk: They make it easy to keep track of the latest lobbying balderdash put out by big corporations. That's because the lobbying messages show up as advertising messages in the Playbook emails.

Via the Wisconsin State Journal of Madison, we learn of the zany way that political officials in that state are handing out job-creation funds. Long story short, they've voted to hand over $6 million in taxpayer cash to a company that's planning to cut its Wisconsin work force in half.

With minimal fanfare, California state officials have nixed an underhanded effort by two Catholic-affiliated universities and their insurers to deprive the universities' employees of insurance coverage for abortions.

"Shareholder democracy" long has been derided as an oxymoron, like "military intelligence" or "jumbo shrimp." Yes, corporate managements bow endlessly to the mandate that they act exclusively in the shareholders' interest, but in real life they treat the poor sap with a few hundred shares as hardly more important than the night janitor.

How Americans will take to the Affordable Care Act over the long haul may be hard to predict, but mapping out its future course need not be entirely the product of guesswork. That's because we have a model on which to base our predictions: Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit enacted just over 10 years ago.

Scratch any social crisis, and you're likely to find economics not far below the surface. Via ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis legal-aid nonprofit, we can see how this has worked to create the dismaying spectacle of the breakdown of justice in Ferguson. (H/t Alex Tabarrok, via Kevin Drum.)

New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait is usually a judicious and perceptive analyst of the intersection between politics and economics. So it's disappointing to see him blindly falling in step with a conservative attack on Social Security.

As students prepare to return to school in the next few weeks, there's no better time for a conservative freakout over education. The issue of the moment is a new outline, or "framework," issued by the College Board for advanced placement classes in US history.

On Sept. 4, 2010, at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, I was part of what the public address announcer proudly told us was the largest crowd ever to watch a football game anywhere in the world, college or pro.

Los Alamos may be a government laboratory with lots of classified secrets, but it also guarantees its researchers intellectual freedom on a par with that enjoyed by university professors. Political scientist James Doyle says that freedom was violated when he was fired last month after questioning U.S. nuclear weapons doctrine in a published article.

In the latest leg of their endless journey to find bad news about the Affordable Care Act, conservative analysts and websites have seized on some ambiguous figures to declare that enrollment is "plummeting," "shrinking," "sinking rapidly"--choose your headline.

"A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History" is the new book by science writer Nicholas Wade that asserts a genetic basis for certain human behaviors and distinguishes them by race. It's been widely panned in book reviews, especially by experts in the fields of science and social science touched on by the work.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that whipping boy of big-business conservatives everywhere, demonstrated its value to the average consumer this week by explaining the pitfalls of bitcoins and other such "virtual currencies."

Audrey Amidon of the National Archives has unearthed and documented a fascinating glimpse of pre-World War II America--films of a Nazi summer camp in upstate New York in 1937, built to indoctrinate the children of German American families in Nazi values. (H/t to Erik Loomis for bringing Amidon's post to our attention.)

Little noticed in coverage of President Obama's signing of the Fair Play and Safe Workplaces executive order July 31 was a provision that has been called "one of the most important positive steps for civil rights in the last 20 years."

Retirement expert Alicia Munnell of Boston College has brought a simmering Social Security mystery out into the open: Why were key figures about the program's benefits for retirees deleted from the latest trustees' report?

Ever solicitous of underprivileged people who have no other way to get their voices heard, USA Today turned over some of its precious op-ed space Wednesday to billionaire Charles Koch, so he might offer his views on "how to really turn the economy around."

The Kansas City Star probably thought it was on solid ground when it published an op-ed by Stephen Moore defending the draconian, and economically debilitating, tax cuts instituted by Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback. (We reported on how the tax cuts have turned Kansas into a smoking ruin here.)

Academic economists have been warning for years that rising economic inequality in the United States is hampering economic growth and punching holes in the social fabric. (See, for example, Piketty and Saez.) But they're only professors, after all, so it's been easy for their views to be ignored by bankers and investment types.

It has been accurately observed that a single sentence in a terse ruling issued last week by the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board has the potential to bring U.S. labor law into sync with the 21st century.

It's both endearing and infuriating to watch American corporate executives wring their hands about how the injustices of the U.S. tax code are forcing them — forcing them! — to reincorporate overseas through the procedure known as inversion.

There were signs almost from the start that the great unknown about the Affordable Care Act was how effectively individual states would implement the law. The question got more complicated after the Supreme Court turned one of the key provisions, the expansion of Medicaid, into a state option.

If you're curious about how Pacific Gas & Electric managed to flout gas line safety rules for years, and why there's reason to doubt that the California Public Utilities Commission will hold the company fully responsible for the explosion that destroyed a California neighborhood in 2010, here's the answer.

Mergers-and-acquisition types on Wall Street are no doubt cackling over the proposed $8.5-billion merger of Dollar Tree and Family Dollar Stores -- and why not, since it was spurred in part by corporate sharpshooter Carl Icahn?

The release of the annual trustees reports for Social Security and Medicare customarily give rise to an outburst of disinformation from the enemies of these social insurance programs -- that comes with the territory when you're putting out documents of hundreds of pages densely packed with graphs, charts and statistics.

Via this recent piece in Wired, we are introduced to a breakthrough in technological services that could make everyone's home or office immeasurably less secure and give almost everyone with a cellphone the opportunity to become a burglar.

Anyone who cares about the advance of medical science and about the promise of biotechnology should be dismayed by how badly the California stem cell agency has handled its latest conflict-of-interest scandal.

The controversial appeals court ruling Tuesday in the Halbig case turned on the question of whether Congress intended to withhold health insurance subsidies from people who enrolled through federal rather than state exchanges.

Obama birth-truthers are so 2008. (When your movement's leading intellectual is Donald Trump, you know your time has passed.) The new meme on the right appears to be inflation-truthing. This is the assertion that President Obama is deliberately low-balling inflation numbers to make his economic record look better.

For a brief moment Tuesday, it looked as though the Affordable Care Act was in big trouble, for a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia had overturned federal insurance subsidies for insurance buyers in 36 states.

As California's drought really starts to bite--the mandatory water use restrictions approved by the state Tuesday are just the beginning--questions are bound to be raised about the indescribably wasteful use of water to retail bottlers.

Several recent articles appearing online have pointed to a couple of burning questions about book-reading in this overstuffed era: Why do people buy books they have no intention of reading? And, how can one ever find the time to read a book at all?

You don't often see scientific researchers turning up their noses at nearly a billion and a half dollars in government funding. Still more rarely will the elite of a research field threaten to boycott a huge international project in their field en masse.

It can be hard to keep up with the latest examples of fraud rings and other organized wrongdoing, but here's one that takes the cake: the scientific monthly Journal of Vibration and Control is retracting 60 articles "implicated in a peer review and citation ring."

Apple's done it. Herbalife has done it. Pfizer wanted to do it. What could be wrong with a corporate maneuver eyed by these fine, upstanding American corporations--and nearly 50 others in the last decade?

Via Reuters comes the news that Samsung, one of the last major manufacturers of plasma TV screens, will shut down production by the end of November. Panasonic had already stopped making plasma panels, and South Korea's LG will end production soon.

Today's science mystery comes courtesy of researchers from Australia, Spain and Saudi Arabia, who have been traveling the seven seas tracking ocean-borne human refuse, much of it plastic. According to their report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some 99% of the expected debris is missing.

In its decision Monday in the Hobby Lobby case, the conservative Supreme Court majority that upheld corporations' religious objections to birth control spends an inordinate amount of time defending itself from the reasoning and wrath of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent.

You may have read recently about the daily struggle for survival in parts of Ukraine and Crimea, where warring pro- and anti-Russian forces are using basic necessities of life, such as water, as weapons against the civilian population. The consequences shock the world's conscience.

The new House majority leader, Republican Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, wasted no time this week establishing his bona fides with the right wing of his party. He went on "Fox News Sunday" to declare that he was in favor of shutting down the Export-Import Bank.

At the end of a war, some people will remain holed up in the trees, thinking they can still turn the tide of a lost cause. Increasingly, that's the best description of the anti-Obamacare dead-enders, including congressional Republicans, who continue to depict the Affordable Care Act as a failure despite facts like these:

The American Apparel story is a saga of sleazy behavior and flagrant dereliction of duty. No, we're not talking about the Los Angeles company's founder, chairman and CEO, Dov Charney, though he's bad enough.

Dealing a blow to efforts by Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder and the National Football League to defend the team's nickname, a panel of administrative judges at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Wednesday canceled the team's trademarks.

That most percipient education critic, Diane Ravitch, takes a closer look at Judge Rolf Treu's verdict overturning California's job protections for teachers, and finds indications that he approached his task with a closed mind.

Tuesday's ruling by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu declaring all sorts of job protections for teachers "unconstitutional" is being hailed by a certain category of education activists.

The world of high-tech hype was thrown on its ear over the weekend by the news that a computer had passed the "Turing Test" for the first time. The idea was that a machine had finally breached a threshold distinguishing human intelligence from artificial intelligence.

There's something about science that makes politicians nervous. The scientific process is unruly. It takes longer to bear fruit than the two-year congressional election cycle. Its results almost always undermine political ideologies.

Oil giant BP this week extended its .000 batting streak in its effort to kill its own settlement in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster, losing a bid to have the Supreme Court halt payments to spill victims while it stretched out its appeal.

The ride-sharing app company Uber last week raised $1.2 billion in venture capital on terms that valued the company at $17 billion. As Will Oremus at Slate.com observed, that's almost as much as Hertz and Avis combined.

Reliable conservative Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation purported to discover an embarrassing fact about income inequality last week: inequality was greater in "blue" states than in "red" states.

Despite frantic warnings from legal experts around the country and from his own attorney general, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on Friday signed a bill killing a local coastal agency's lawsuit against the oil and gas industry.

Devoted baseball fans surely have noticed that a certain tradition has been missing from the game this season. Yes, it's those volcanic, spittle-flecked donnybrooks between managers and umpires that used to lend so much sudden drama to the action on the field.

Seattle this week saw and raised skeptics on the minimum wage, as its City Council unanimously approved a $15 hourly minimum for the lowest-paid workers. The nation's highest minimum wage will kick in over the next seven years, depending on the size of the employer and the benefits paid.

In his continuing effort to prove that cutting government benefit programs such as disability is actually good for beneficiaries, such as the disabled -- after all, that's what "compassionate conservatism" is all about -- Scott Winship responds to my earlier post describing the underlying theme of his program as "contempt for the underprivileged."

Kevin Outterson of Boston University's School of Public Health raises the question, a little mischievously, of whether Steve Ballmer's $2 billion is really being put to the greatest possible social use.

The concept of a corporation "too big to fail" is typically applied to big banks, usually as an explanation of why they haven't been brought to book for their role in the 2008 crash and why their top executives still roam free through corporate suites and across country club fairways.

A couple of weeks ago, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), killed a major piece of patent reform legislation, presumably for the year. The tech community is still shaking in dismay, and you should too.

Sheryl Sandberg may be finding that the problem with turning herself into an advocate for unappreciated women in the workplace is that there are a lot of unappreciated women out there who need her help.

Call it the "skin-in-the-game" argument: the notion that people will use medical care more sparingly -- and presumably more prudently -- if they have to pay a larger share of the costs out of their own pockets.

The conservative movement last week unveiled another effort to show that compassion for the downtrodden of society is what really animates its economic policies, which on the surface appear designed to widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

In legislative proceedings, the most important words in a debate often are the ones left unmentioned. At a hearing held by a California state assembly committee last month about legalizing online poker, the unspoken term was PokerStars.

Word reaches us today from Sacramento of the death of a shameful bill written by California medical lobbyists to resurrect a failed addiction treatment program for doctors. Patients should be happy to see the measure laid to rest.

Charles Blahous, one of the public trustees of Social Security, has been on the warpath over how I reported his views on the burning question of whether Social Security contributes to the federal deficit.

It's necessary to correct an old canard repeated by former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner about Franklin Roosevelt's behavior in the long interregnum between the 1932 election and his 1933 inauguration.

It's not always politics that makes strange bedfellows, but urgency. That's what's driving the sudden popularity of an effort to reform Proposition 13 by eliminating what has long been one of its most flagrant loopholes for commercial property owners.

BP, the giant oil company that was responsible for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, has been moving mountains to persuade the public that it's being rooked by a lot of small businessmen filing claims related to the disaster. Adding to the irony, the company is claiming that settlement terms it agreed to are at fault.

My colleagues Jim Peltz and Bill Plaschke both reviewed the ongoing fiasco of the Dodgers' TV rights deal this weekend. Both came to the same conclusion--that it's a disaster for the ball club and for the fans. Frankly, who could look at the facts and conclude anything else?

It's not surprising that former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's astonishing misconception about Social Security should be seconded by conservatives. After all, his assertion that the program adds to the federal deficit (aired in his new book, "Stress Test") is a claim they've been making for years to undermine confidence in the program.

Noah Smith at noahpinion reports on how those bestselling "Freakonomics" authors/entrepreneurs Steven D. Levitt (an economist) and Stephen J. Dubner (a wordsmith) revealed the limits of their brand of pop economics with an anecdote they tell about an encounter with British Prime Minister David Cameron. (Their meeting took place before he became PM.)

Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's memoir, "Stress Test," is being picked apart fairly intensively by the Washington and Wall Street press gangs, who are busily retailing the book's snarks and slights.

U.S. private equity firms, which today control a record $3.5 trillion in assets, fought ferociously against a Dodd-Frank reform provision requiring that they register with and submit to examinations by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Today's you-gotta-be-kidding-me moment comes courtesy of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which claims that the mass media are all so hopelessly liberal that its only option is to start its own website offering "just true, straight-down-the-middle journalism."

In an era in which corporations have been trying every possible stratagem to cut employee benefits (see our look at the Obamacare employer mandate earlier today), a new threat to retirement benefits has just arisen.

As complaints and cavils about the Affordable Care Act fall by the wayside, one piece of the law looms ever larger as its most controversial element: the employer mandate, which in 2016 will impose a penalty on businesses with 50 to 99 employees for not offering them health coverage.

The most powerful weapon that debaters wield against the unwary is causation: marijuana use leads to heroin addiction, pornography to rape, video games to mass murder, high consumption of margarine to divorces in Maine.

Plainly stung by the chorus of ridicule that has greeted their latest attempt to paint anti-union policies and tax cuts for the rich as pathways to economic nirvana, the folks at the American Legislative Exchange Council have struck back with a "response to the critics."

Considering how much money may be at stake, it was inevitable that the increasingly nasty fight between a Santa Barbara Indian tribe and its neighbors over a big parcel of undeveloped land would attract outside interest.

Corporate executives love nothing more than a scapegoat to saddle with blame for their own mediocre performances. As we reported late last year and USA Today confirms again, they're finding the Affordable Care Act to be a gold-plated gift. It's almost as useful as the lousy winter weather, which is saying something.

Things continue to get tough for the Obamacare dead-enders, those increasingly lonely opponents whose only comeback against the flow of good news about the Affordable Care Act is to conjure up absurd arguments against it (I mean you, Cato's Michael Cannon) or, if all else fails, make stuff up.

BP, the perpetrator of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, has been working assiduously over the last year to wriggle out from under a financial settlement it reached for gulf businesses harmed by the disaster.

The film director and movie star Ben Affleck, soon to be featured as Hollywood's next Batman, did the gambling world a favor last week by placing professional blackjack back in the news. He did so by counting cards at the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas and getting ejected from the game.

The final battles of any war often are the bloodiest. They're waged by the last holdouts, dead-enders desperate to prove to themselves and their dwindling followers that their efforts were not in vain.

Michael F. Cannon, whom the libertarian Cato Institute courageously describes as its "director of health policy studies," is unhappy that I called him out the other day for writing "the lamest anti-Obamacare column of all."

The moment that National Basketball Assn. Commissioner Adam Silver said he would ask the league to eject Donald Sterling as a team owner, he handed Sterling the opportunity to cause the league a tremendous amount of pain and suffering.

Positive news reports about insurance enrollments under Affordable Care Act have been coming out so steadily that they barely make headlines anymore. Still searching for a way to depict Obamacare as a "train wreck," GOP critics of the law have no option but to make up the bad news.

You couldn't say the crime is being committed by stealth. Quite the contrary: Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, is aiming to slay net neutrality in broad daylight. The murder weapon is a proposal to allow Internet service providers to charge content companies more for faster access to their subscribers.

The Donald Sterling controversy had much of the right wing vibrating this weekend with the revelation that the purported arch-racist Sterling was (gasp!) a Democrat. This shed little light on the Sterling affair, other than to underscore the ancient truism that some public scandals are so explosive that for at least a period of time one can write or say anything one wishes about them without fear of contradiction.

As we've recently observed, conservative opponents of the Affordable Care Act have pulled out the stops to paint the law as an unmitigated disaster--notwithstanding its documented gains in health insurance coverage for millions of Americans nationwide.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, the House GOP's mangy attack dog, has squandered his chairmanship of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform trying to embarrass the Obama administration over a host of ginned-up purported scandals. The IRS, Benghazi--you know the list.

No literary experience is rarer than reading a book that changes the way you see the world. "War and Peace" will change the way you look at the heroism and foibles of all men and women, from the ordinary to the exceptional. Certain novels of William Faulkner ("Light in August," "Absalom, Absalom!") succeed in elevating everyday life to the level of biblical parable.

Every battery needs recharging, and those that operate the Economy Hub are no exception. We'll be taking time off over the next two weeks. Blogging in that period will be sparse, on an as-needed basis only. Normal programming will resume on April 28.

A certain William Wachtel, the co-founder of WhyTuesday, an election reform group chaired by former UN Ambassador Andrew Young, wrote me over the weekend to complain that I treated Young harshly by criticizing his proposal to require Social Security to issue photo IDs. I called it "a terrible idea."

The continuing push for higher minimum wages across the country has much to recommend it, but the campaign shouldn't keep us from recognizing a truly insidious practice that impoverishes low-wage workers all the more. It's known as wage theft.

It's doubtful that anyone ever expected the resignation of Kathleen Sebelius as secretary of Health and Human Services--whether it came last fall during the website disaster or on Thursday, when it actually was announced--to bring clarity to the national debate over the Affordable Care Act.

Some Democrats have suddenly embraced the old notion of turning Social Security cards into national photo IDs. The goal is to undermine Republican voter suppression efforts that rely on demanding government-issued photos, by making these universally available.

Comcast and Time Warner Cable today brought their road show to the U.S. Senate, trying to prove that their proposed $40-billion merger will bring fabulous service to consumers, create new competition and, one would think, end the stalemate over the Crimea.

Two founders of Third Way, a Washington think tank that carries water for Wall Street by pretending to be a "centrist" organization, have come out with a new proposal for a mass retirement program that, yes, will line Wall Street's pockets while promising the average worker something it can't deliver.

As often happens when the financial demands on government social programs rise, there's been a lot of talk lately about the need to return to the traditional American system of community and faith-based help for the needy: charity, not government handouts.

Robert Proctor doesn't think ignorance is bliss. He thinks that what you don't know can hurt you. And that there's more ignorance around than there used to be, and that its purveyors have gotten much better at filling our heads with nonsense.

There are two broad categories of government reformer. One is the type who tries addressing government inequities where and as they occur — a housing crisis here, a water crisis there, racial discrimination here, there and everywhere. Then there's the type who advocates throwing out the old system wholesale and starting from scratch.

Nothing seemed to underscore the revolving door between federal regulators and the companies they regulate as vividly as the two milestones marked on Jan. 17 at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

You may have missed it, given the launch of the Christmas shopping season and all the foofaraw about the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, but earlier this month Barack Obama gave the most important speech of his presidency.

Never mind the conventional speculation about whether the resolution of some political standoff in Washington favors Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, "entitlement" fans or skeptics.

With the Oct. 1 rollout of a major facet of the Affordable Care Act on the horizon, you'll be hearing a lot about the glitches, loopholes and shortcomings of this most important restructuring of America's healthcare system in our lifetimes. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

Everybody wants to see the perpetrators of the financial crisis punished, but you have to feel a little sorry for Standard & Poor's, the credit rating firm being sued by the federal government for its role in the disaster.

Budget discussions in Washington these days always seem to deteriorate into arguments over what government is supposed to do for its citizens, and what should be left aside. Is the reach of government strictly defined in the Constitution? Or tradition? And, if so, whose "tradition"?

For generations of industry research executives, AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories served as an inspiration: a warren of youthful scientists and engineers assigned to go where their intellects took them, not especially concerned about serving the corporate bottom line, picking up cartloads of Nobel Prizes along the way. Bell Labs was the model for, among others, Xerox Corp.'s legendary Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, which spun out the personal computer, Windows-style displays, Ethernet and many other advances that delivered their bounty more to society at large than to the parent company.

Several current or former workers for the people behind those 1-800-GET-THIN ads have made allegations about this weight-loss enterprise that government regulators should have gotten to the bottom of long ago. Taken together, the allegations are that its patients are subjected to life-threatening conditions.

Like most big companies, Irvine pharmaceutical giant Allergan Inc. likes to project the image of an upstanding corporate citizen. Indeed, it devotes several pages of its website to its purported good works.

Wilbur D.Curtis invented the globular glass coffeepot, that staple of coffee counters everywhere, in 1940. Since then his son and grandsons have turned Wilbur Curtis Co. into a manufacturing concern that earns revenue approaching $100 million by turning out commercial coffee brewing equipment from a sprawling factory in Montebello.

Of all the ways in which California residents have slit their fiscal throats over the last 30 years, surely the most inexplicable is the bestowal of a gaping tax loophole on commercial and industrial property owners.

The art of setting automobile insurance rates is incomprehensible to most of us civilians. Liability coverage, comprehensive insurance, assigned risk pools, discounts, surcharges . . . the list goes on. Just try to figure out how your carrier arrived at the figure at the bottom of your itemized bill -- I know nuclear physicists who can't do that math.